Features

‘T’ Heirs Farm Market off Old Ocean Highway just outside Bolivia has fresh produce available daily. The farm stand's owner, Doris Thornton-Green, also sells her produce at local farmers markets in Shallotte and Southport.

After several years in the making, “Margaret, Pirate Queen” is ready to set sail.

Brunswick County resident Marsha Tennant, who along with her students wrote the illustrated book based on the pirate adventures of her late, great dog, Margaret, is thrilled the book once targeted for publication by Scholastic has finally been released by a new publisher.

I didn’t so much think about becoming a vet, I just was. Some say it’s a “passion” while others call it “pathology.” Either way, working and living with animals is all I’ve known since I was “knee-high to a grasshopper” as we used to say in South Georgia.

Sure, it’s hard to become a vet and even harder to be one, but it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen myself doing.

Look in the sky. Is it a plane, a UFO or leftover fireworks from earlier this month?

If the time is just after sunset and you are looking west, it is the goddess of beauty, the god of war, and the god of agriculture.

Huh? They are normally enemies, a strange trio to be gathering in a small group. The group is three planets, which are the namesakes of these gods and goddess. From brightest to dimmest the list reads: Venus, Saturn and Mars. To view, look west and up at 9 o’clock.

After three years of construction, St. Brendan Catholic Church on Ocean Highway in Shallotte will officially move into its new sanctuary starting with Sunday Mass at 8 a.m., 9:30 a.m. and 11:15 a.m.

That afternoon, at 2 p.m., the congregation and staff will dedicate the new 9,000 square-foot building, with seating for 1,100 people, with a special ceremony including a speech from Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Raleigh.

Grady Eyler, 3, of Haymarket, Va., teed off at River Country Miniature Golf on Ocean Isle Beach on a recent summer day. It was the family’s first stay on the beach, but Grady’s mother said it wouldn’t be the last.

Two Shallotte churches have “topped” off their renovations with brand new steeples in recent days. Members have been working to expand and rebuild to serve their growing populations.

At Unity Worship Center, a small church with a membership of about 50 on Holden Beach Road, congregant Bobby Batson made a steeple just for the church. On Monday, he and other supporters placed it atop the 100-year-old building as church members and the Rev. Tom Stephenson looked on and cheered.

Where is the center of the Milky Way? If you answered right in the middle that would be correct and funny, however, I was thinking about the location of the center as judged by the stars.
What direction in the sky should you look during a humid summer night to be looking toward the center?
To find it, all you have to do is find an archer and a scorpion, and look in between them, and you are staring at the center of the Milky Way. That sounds easy enough to accomplish.

Winding River resident Joe Koletar’s third book targeted to businesses, “Rethinking Risk: How Companies Sabotage Themselves and What They Must Do Differently,” will be available for purchase this week.

During his career as a fraud investigator, Koletar wrote extensively about fraud in various professional journals, leading to another career for the now semi-retired expert.

“I started writing an article for a professional journal. I got carried away,” he recalled.

Clayton Bartizal, business development manager at resortandlodges.com, said recently various teams of writers and editors write “top 10” articles once or twice each month based on social media reviews, price ranges, the size of the units and how resorts meet customers’ needs.

“We get a lot of [website] traffic from that,” Bartizal said. “It’s a lot of great free traffic our partners get.”

While many of the sites chosen are advertising partners with resortandlodges, many are not, he said.

From chasing bank robbers to poring over Swiss bank records to find fraud, Joe Koletar’s career has spanned more than 40 years, numerous countries and countless adventures.

After graduating college, he served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Special Security Group. From there, he was recruited into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he got his start investigating bank robberies.

Ocean Isle Beach—Even as an unusual early-summer heat wave sets in, guests and employees at The Winds Resort Beach Club don’t mind at all—as long as they can hang out at the pool, enjoy drinks at the tiki bar and walk onto the strand whenever the mood strikes.